The Other Parent: The Inside Story of the Media's Effect on Our Children - Softcover

Chapter One

At Home With the Other Parent

It's 6:30 A.M. Saturday morning. Thank God, we get to sleep in....All quiet in San Francisco except for the foghorn -- until the padding of tiny footsteps in the hallway, followed by the creaking of our bedroom door. It's Kirk, seven years old and full of energy. He struts into the room and does his little "Shake Your Booty" routine in front of our mirror. Where'd he learn that stuff? How could my son be imitating Mick Jagger at this age? "Dad, can I get into bed with you and Mom or go into the family room and watch TV?"

"Kirk, it's six-thirty in the morning," I plead; "we want to sleep. Okay, you can watch TV...but only PBS or Nick Jr. Nothing else. Got it?"

Kirk rushes off to the family room. Uh-oh. More footsteps. Now it's four-year-old Carly. "Kirk is watching Dragon Tales, and I wanna watch Barney," she says, crying -- well, fake crying. She wants her Barney video. "Work it out with your brother," I grunt. "Mom and I want some more sleep. It's Saturday."

More footsteps. This time it's Lily, eight years old and rubbing those big blue eyes. She wants to play Backyard Baseball on the computer and wants me to help install it. I want to pull the blankets over my head and hide. Why not let the TV and the computer be the baby-sitter while we grab an extra an hour or two of sleep?

Like most parents, my wife, Liz, and I find ourselves wrestling with that temptation regularly. It's so easy to let our kids tune into the media world while we steal a few precious moments for ourselves. We may be too tired, stressed, or busy to keep a close eye on what our kids are watching, but most of us assume that it's benign. After all, TV was such a big part of our own childhood experience, and we turned out okay, right?

Maybe so. But in fact our kids are living in an entirely different, much more complex media environment than we ever could have imagined at their age. The rules -- and the risks -- have changed radically, and many of us have been slow to grasp the difference.

In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when many of us grew up, kids lived in a much simpler and safer media environment. Back then, there were only three major networks plus PBS, a couple of key radio stations in each market, a few local movie theaters, and computers that were so big they filled a room. Media then was a lot like the "Ozzie and Harriet" type of family -- safe, positive, under control -- and it doesn't bear the slightest relation to the reality today. Unlike the children of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, whose media choices were limited and stood out like isolated, familiar landmarks in communal life, kids today inhabit an environment saturated and shaped by a complex "mediascape" that envelops and bombards them day and night. Roaming among TVs, VCRs, the Internet, radios, CD players, movie screens, and electronic games, kids can easily spend more time in this vast mediascape than in the real world -- and, not surprisingly, far more time than they spend in direct contact with their parents.

Today, as child development expert T. Berry Brazelton, M.D., warns, media is really "the biggest competitor for our children's hearts and minds."1 According to a University of Maryland study, American kids now spend 40 percent less time with their parents than kids did in the mid-sixties. That's right, 40 percent less time -- just seventeen hours a week total with their parents, down from thirty hours in 1965. At the same time, they spend far more than double that amount of time -- more than forty hours per week on average -- staring at the tube or the computer screen, listening to the radio or CDs, and playing video games. Now, which is the parent in this picture?

It's strange that as adults we've paid so little attention to such a powerful influence on our children's lives. So many of us read armloads of books about babies and child care. We're careful to teach our kids not to talk to strangers or wander the streets by themselves. Most of us make sure we know where our children are physically and with whom. And yet, day after day, year after year, we let them wander alone, virtually unsupervised, through this other universe -- almost completely oblivious to what they're seeing, hearing, playing with, and learning.

Think about it. If another adult spent five or six hours a day with your kids, regularly exposing them to sex, violence, and rampantly commercial values, you would probably forbid that person to have further contact with them. Yet most of us passively allow the media to expose our kids routinely to these same behaviors -- sometimes worse -- and do virtually nothing about it.

The New Media Landscape

I have to admit that it took me a long time to understand this new media reality and its effect on kids. That's strange, because kids have been my passion since I was fifteen, when I got my first job as a counselor at the Fresh Air Fund camp in upstate New York. It was my mom who first inspired my love for kids. She worked as a schoolteacher in low-income schools for more than thirty years, and her "lectures" about the importance of teaching were a regular staple of our dinner table conversations for as long as I can remember. When I founded the national child advocacy organization Children Now in 1988, kids became my life calling and have ever since been at the center of my professional life.

But it was only when we had our first child, Lily, in 1993 that I really began to appreciate the impact of the media on kids' lives. I can still remember how, at as early as eight months old, my baby daughter was already actively responding to images that would flicker across the TV screen. It was right about then that I started noticing, during the ball games that I so love to watch, all those sexy beer commercials with scantily clad women, and cringing when ads came on for TV shows and movies about kidnappings and gruesome crimes -- wondering if I should change the channel or at least mute them when our baby girl was in the room. What had seemed perfectly normal was suddenly making me feel uncomfortable.

Like most parents, I wasn't prepared for this new media reality. Growing up, my parents didn't let me watch much TV at all, because they thought reading and active play were more important. Sports on TV or radio were pretty much the only exception to the rule, and my brothers and I occasionally went to the neighbors' to watch the Three Stooges. I can still remember being upset in fourth grade because most of my classmates could discuss Batman in intimate detail, and we weren't even allowed to watch it. Those were the days when the Smothers Brothers were considered risque, and when parents decried the influence of the Beatles. When All in the Family first appeared, it was considered edgy television because it dealt with issues like racism and discrimination against women. All in all, it was a very different era.

Back then, media was also still governed by at least some semblance of public-interest policy. The broadcast networks saw their news divisions as the standard bearers of a great tradition and often operated them at breakeven or a loss. There was, for a brief time, the "family hour" -- a voluntary code among programmers that they would air only family-friendly shows until 9:00 P.M. because so many children might be watching. We all knew that many TV shows could be as worthless as junk food, but for the most part we assumed they weren't a bad influence. Many of us who grew up in those days assume that the media continues to operate under those same rules today.

But while we weren't paying attention, everything changed. The implicit bond of trust between families and the media was broken. Spurred by cable competition and the relentless deregulation of the media industry during the 1980s, TV broadcasters, led by the new Fox network, abruptly abandoned the family hour and dropped the unwritten code that kept most sexual and violent content off the screen. Instead of maintaining a safe harbor for kids and families, the networks flooded channel after channel with increasingly explicit sex, commercialism, and violence. So much for voluntary codes of social responsibility.

At the same time, the reach of the mass media exploded, and it will be expanding even more in coming years. Cable channels have proliferated since the 1980s, and as industry pundits like to say, we've gone from the age of broadcasting to narrow casting. Instead of three major networks plus PBS, there are now hundreds of channels, and that number will soon multiply further with the advent of digital TV. With personal computers in more than half of all American homes, the Internet and electronic games are also competing, along with heavily marketed music, for kids' attention. As every parent knows all too well, kids are now surrounded by the clamor of media messages day and night. For millions of American kids, the media is, in fact, "the other parent" -- a force that is shaping their reality, setting their expectations, guiding their behavior, defining their self-image, and dictating their interests, choices, and values.

Confronting this media reality as parents, my wife and I realized that we had to take a much more active parenting role when it came to the media and our kids. Liz and I aren't zealots by any means, and neither one of us can relate to finger-wagging moralists or fundamentalist ideologues on the topic of the media and morals. In fact, I don't even think it's practical to go as far as the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recently recommended that kids under age two never watch TV. I'm hardly a paragon of virtue -- every once in a while, I can't resist showing my kids the food-fight scene from Animal House -- but my wife and I have set pretty strict media limits for our own kids.

Still, whatever rules we have at home sometimes feel like the equivalent of sticking a finger in the media dike. At the age of five, for example -- thanks to one of her friends across the street -- Lily was introduced to Spice Girls videos. I'll never forget watching with no small degree of horror as our tiny firstborn child provocatively danced and lip-synched to her favorite Spice Girls tune, "If You Wanna Be My Lover" -- abruptly teaching me the role-modeling influence that media has on even the youngest kids. I also noticed that most of the second, third, and fifth graders I taught at E. Morris Cox Elementary School in East Oakland, where I volunteered for ten years, don't have a clue about the names of their senators or the vice president of our country. But they know all about Bart Simpson, Kenan and Kel, the latest hip-hop artists, and the names of virtually every character on prime-time TV.

Inside the Media

When I started Children Now, I was convinced that if we were to reshape public policies on crucial children's issues such as education, Head Start, and child health care, we first needed to change the attitudes of the public and opinion leaders on these subjects. So from the beginning of our work as a major lobby group for children's rights, we approached media leaders for help in spreading the message.

By the time Lily was born, Children Now had begun researching and publicizing the effect of the various media, including news, entertainment, and advertising, on the daily lives, values, and behavior of children. We had commissioned national surveys asking kids to describe their experiences with mass media, and we were astonished to find that this was the first time that polls of this type had ever been conducted. Despite the incredible barrage of media that bombards kids, nobody had ever bothered to ask children themselves what they thought about its impact.

During the course of those studies, I spoke directly with hundreds of youngsters. Each had opinions on the media, and they all cared deeply that their views were being heard. The first thing most kids made clear was how thoroughly tuned into the media they and their friends were. They talked about how much it affected their peers and how it often left them feeling scared, angry, or depressed. I remember one ten-year-old telling me, for example, that he was "more scared watching the local news on TV than horror movies, because the news is for real."

Kids also said that the media didn't accurately reflect their reality -- that media companies didn't understand what it was like to be a kid. "They think we're pretty dumb, so they just feed us a lot of sex and violence whenever possible" -- that was the type of comment that I often heard. They felt alienated yet at the same time heavily influenced by what they listened to or saw. And few kids I talked to thought that media was doing much of anything positive for kids -- such as modeling responsible behavior or educating them about issues that were important in their lives.

As we started lobbying in Washington, D.C., on issues like the Children's Television Act and a new ratings system for TV programming, it was amazing to see how few voices there were on the kids' side of the debate. I was also continuously frustrated to see how little serious attention was paid to the influence of media on kids by leaders from Washington to Hollywood and Madison Avenue. With rare and notable exceptions, few people seemed to be doing much of anything to make it better. So, in 1996, with my own kids squarely in mind, I decided to move on from Children Now and trade in my advocate's spurs for those of a media company leader. I was tired of trying to convince media leaders to do a better job for kids, so I had the notion that I would just do the job myself. As my mom always said, "Put your money where your mouth is." So armed with a little moxie and a terrific group of investors, I set out to build a new kids' educational media company -- JP Kids -- that would create high-quality content for kids on TV, the Internet, publishing, and related platforms. I had no idea what I was in for. And that's when my real education in the world of kids' media began.

In 2002, six years after launching JP Kids, we are still solidly in business, one of the few remaining independent kids' educational media companies dedicated to high-quality content in the United States. Our biggest hit series has been the very popular show The Famous Jett Jackson, which runs daily on the Disney Channel, and we've got a couple of new series that will hopefully be airing soon on PBS and other networks. We've also got a promising new publishing division as well as new educational media initiatives, but I'm not writing this book to promote JP Kids or Children Now. They'll succeed or fail on their own merits. Rather, this is an insider's view of the world of kids and media, from someone who's seen it up close from many different angles. As a parent, as a national child advocate, as someone who teaches constitutional law and civil liberties courses at Stanford University, and as the head of one of the few independent children's media companies in the United States, I've had a unique vantage point. And from where I stand, the world of media and children is not a very pretty picture. In fact, I'm convinced that the huge influence of the "other parent" should be a matte...